I’m relieved to see that justice has prevailed this afternoon, and that Vincent Tabak’s ‘defence’ or ‘explanation’ that he hadn’t intended to kill Joanna Yeates but had simply panicked when he ‘misread’ her signals, and put his hands around her throat to stop her screaming, was given the short shrift that it deserved. I’m disappointed to hear it was a majority verdict of 10:2 rather than a unanimous verdict from the jury mind, but there you go.
What has really pissed me off though, is the news now coming out that Tabak had a particular liking for violent strangulation porn, that numerous films etc depicting this had been found on his computer, and that there was some evidence he’d watched them a number of times – i.e. they weren’t on his computer through some kind of mysterious downloading accident. And that the judge decided this information was not relevant to the case, or at least, that telling the jury about it would have been prejudicial to Tabak getting a fair hearing.
“Mr Justice Field, the trial judge, accepted that the viewing of pornography showing violence or a threat of violence was “reprehensible”. But he did not allow the jury to hear the evidence because he felt its value in explaining why Tabak acted as he did could not outweigh the prejudice it would cause his defence.
He also turned down the prosecution’s suggestion that the evidence about escort agencies should go before the jury to correct the impression Tabak gave of being sexually naive and in a loving, monogamous relationship. The jury was left ignorant of what the police believed was important evidence.“
I mean seriously?
Understandably this information has sparked quite considerable debate on Twitter, but it’s difficult to fit everything people have to say about this into Twitter’s character limit, so I thought I’d give people some space to vent/discuss the issue here.
So, your thoughts please: do you think the jury should have been told about Tabak’s liking for violent misogynist porn? Do you think a liking for violent misogynist porn is relevant evidence in a murder/sex crime case such as this? Or do you think Mr Justice Field was right, and that to admit such evidence would have been prejudicial?
Too Much To Say For Myself 
Would he have had grounds to appeal the guilty verdict, had the jury known about the porn/use of prostitutes, etc? And how did two people not fins him guilty after he ADMITTED that he had done it? *head/desk*
Yes, it was directly relevant to the crime. I can understand WHY the judge may have excluded it, in that if he hadn’t done, it would probably have led to an appeal and he may have erred on the side of caution – it would have been next to impossible to retry Tabak once the facts were known. It wasn’t (in itself) evidence that Tabak killed Yeates deliberately, but as I said about two minutes before the verdict came out, how the hell do you strangle someone accidentally? You want to stop someone screa screaming, you put your hand over their mouth.
I didn’t think there was a chance he’d be found not guilty on that alone. The stuff about escort agencies IS irrelevant, so I don’t necessarily think that should have been presented. It’s not evidence of murder. But given that the prosecution’s case was that the murder was sexually motivated, the stuff about the interest in snuff porn was relevant.
I think they should have been able to talk about it. from what i could tell, his defence was about how it wasn’t sexually motivated, but this would suggest it may have been. Plus there are the studies that find associative links between violent porn and violent behaviour, or increased tolerance of violence against women, from Gail Dines and also from the APA.
It suggests that people still don’t want to admit that these links can exist.
I absolutely think the jury should have been told that Tabak visited prostitutes – given his defence was attempting to portray him as monogamous and sexually naive. With regard to his taste for misogynist porn… it’s a tough one. With hindsight I can see relevance – but had he been innocent, telling a jury could have prejudiced them. Should one’s taste in ‘legal’ media be taken into account? If it was ‘soft’ porn, no strangulation, would it be relevant? I don’t have an easy answer here. To look at it a couple of other hypothetical ways, if a woman had killed a man and had consumed violent anti-male porn around the time of the incident, what do we think would have happened? Would that be considered relevant? Or what if a racially motivated killing took place. Would consuming race-hate media around the incident be relevant? I think it probably goes to reveal a state of mind and opinions, that perhaps do predispose the perpetrator to a prejudice. Perhaps the jury should be advised that whilst people do consume ‘reprehensible’ media they do not all go on to commit violence.
Surely they should have been told?
It included images that mirrored how he left Jo Yeates body and that incuded fantasy images of the act of strangulation of women by men. Why would details of his activities and sexual preferences that bore such close resemblance to his behaviour when he killed her, be deemed ‘inappropriate’ evidence?
This wasn’t any old crime where the accused had a preference for particular types of porn. It was a case where his taste in porn mirrored his behaviour with Jo Yeates and where the prosecution had to prove ‘intent’. And if that knowledge ‘prejudiced his case’, why should that become the prosecutions problem? It was his choice to view those images, why wasn’t it the right of the jury to know about it when trying to weigh up the extent of his ‘intent’? We can debate distinctions between fantasy life and real-life behaviour but in this case, wasn’t viewing these kind of images at least worthy of consideration by the jury in their difficult task of trying to deliberate on ‘intent’?
I wonder how the two jurors who argued he wasn’t guilty of murder feel now in the light of this information. How might all of us feel about the withholding of these details if they had returned a majority not-guilty verdict?
Surely those videos would have showed intent?
The argument that ‘had he been innocent’ loses all merit when the porn was so specific and linked to Jo Yeates’ murder, one video depicted a woman with a likeness to Jo, (one he watched not long before he squeezed her last breath) and the intricate detail of how he lay her body with her top up, just as in one of the videos. The other elements of his fetish seemed to focus in women bound in car boots. How much more relevant did his porn need to be to be relevant and not prejudiced.
I don’t know if it’s the over zealous feminist in me that sees a woman’s character being raked over again and again by our legal system but, in the interests of fairness, not men’s. Even when these women are victims.
All good points from previous commenters. I would say that it’s questionable even to even circumstantially link adult media (including GTA and other violent video games, gangsta rap and metal etc ad infinitum) with offences. “And they blame it on Marilyn” as Emimnem famously said following Columbine. That said, porn might be a specific exception, because of its “artlessness”. Remember the famous Friends episode where Chandler and Joey get porn and are then bemused when the titillating scenarios they see in films don’t occur in real life? That’s a flippant diorama but it’s how regular consumption of porn will affect certain people if they use it a lot.
Whether it is evidence towards a murder conviction though is extremely dodgy ground. Thinking (or watching) is not saying and it certainly is not doing, in and of itself. And it opens the way to “he was that KIND of man” which is anathema to proper fair trial processes.
To preempt a potential response, namely that such denigration of character is regularly considered appropriate when cross-examining witnesses, I will say this. A witness does not face criminal jeopardy as a result of testimony, although it may of course be personally and emotionally traumatic. A defendant is at direct personal risk. The due process that protects the defendant ensures liberty is not curtailed without conviction, and the fairness of any deemed conviction.
TL;DR: No, the court was right to withhold from the jury as it does not directly evidence the commission of an offence.
It pains me to say it but I agree with the judge that it could have prejudiced the jury regarding his guilt or innocence. It’s circumstantial when guilt is unknown and there’s so much prejudice about porn that you could never expect a fair trial if that kind of information was released when deciding if someone commited murder or not.
BUT I wish we had a system where the jury decides the punishment, or where evidence that wasn’t presented in court can then be used to petition the judge for a harsher sentence than the crime would normally deserve. Once someone’s guilt is confirmed by jury, at that point the evidence becomes relevant and not circumstantial (as it’s been agreed the accused commited the crime, and the evidence in this case shows a correlation with the method of murder). In my opinion Tabak is showing signs of a serial killer in the making, and I suspect the police would say much the same. That should mean a very long sentence, even life, to ensure that the dangerous individual, who has already killed once (that we know of) can’t try to act out their fantasy again in the future, resulting in further deaths. But inevitably he will serve a decade or so and then be released, on good behaviour. I hope he beats the odds and has a fundamental character change in prison, but I seriously doubt it will happen.
Of course it’s relevant. I’m sure if I robbed a bank, was subsequently on trial for it and my search history showed extensive googling of “How to rob a bank”, they would have plenty to say about it during the trial.
People don’t like to think there’s any link between watching violent porn and committing sexual violence, it’s as simple as that. Can you imagine any other crime where if you were looking it up beforehand, it wouldn’t be seen as some prior intent?
But for some reason any crime against women always seemed to be viewed as being provoked by the women unless proven otherwise. Tabak’s defense was basically that if Jo Yeates has let him have sex with her, he wouldn’t killed her, in other words, he responded to her rejection (this is a bollocks argument, but one that gets frequent airing in such cases).
The fact that evidence points to him having a fixation with stranguling women shows this defense to be utter rubbish. Jo was doomed from the start. Hiding the porn usuage hides that fact and very nearly lead to a miscarriage of justice.
I am absolutely livid at this. It’s just another case of the legal system’s contempt for women.
Of course they should have been told!!!
And the fact that two of the jury did not agree that it was murder is unbelievable, in the light of all the evidence. Perhaps with this additional evidence it would have been unanimous.
I am also disgusted at the way the media keep repeating his ridiculous claim that Joanna Yeates invited him in, and flirted with him. It must be so awful for her family to keep hearing that bollocks.
Thank god he’s been convicted of murder, but the jury definitely should have been told about his porn use. Like Safiya above, i am absolutely livid and raging about this.
Safiya: I’m sure if I robbed a bank, was subsequently on trial for it and my search history showed extensive googling of “How to rob a bank”, they would have plenty to say about it during the trial.
Right, but how to distinguish that in court from the case where you didn’t rob a bank, but were googling information about bank robberies for your latest novel, and then get arrested for bank robbery because you look a bit like the actual robber? Remembering that juries have an average – i.e. atrocious – grasp of counter-intuitive statistical results.
Since far more people look up information about crimes than commit a particular instance of a crime, knowing that they looked up that information tells you virtually nothing about whether they committed this specific crime.
It’s easy enough to work backwards, once you know that they’re guilty, to see that their previous behaviour was preparatory or indicative. For very good reasons the jury must not be tempted to – invalidly – work forwards. 99%+ of people who look up violent porn did not kill Yeates. Even 99%+ of murderers who look up violent porn did not kill Yeates.
In this particular case, since he’d already admitted manslaughter, it looks like an odd decision and risking a miscarriage of justice.
But imagine Jeffries – her landlord – had continued to be the suspect, and had been found guilty after the jury had been told about the various vaguely suspicious things the press reported on in contempt of court. That would also be a miscarriage of justice – and a far more severe one, since it would have left Tabak free and put the innocent Jeffries in prison.
It seems wrong, but I think the judge was right here.
Whilst the additional evidence (particularly the prostituted women part) may have been circumstantial, if the defence are going to make up a pack of fairy stories as to the defendant being ‘sexually naive and monogamous’, then that is adequate grounds to prove otherwise.
Although I personally agree with Safiya, that a history of fascination that are specific to the crime on trial for, should be admissible. Bank robbery, snuff porn, whatever. Snuff porn does not magically fly onto your hard drive, you have to put it there (trojan attack withstanding, but a proper forensic analysis of your computer will show the difference). Strangely, my computer is snuff porn free.
I am also positive that this judge also instructed the jury to come back with a unanimous verdict, which I thought was odd. Frankly, this judge was doing everything he could ‘reasonably’ get away with, to get Tabak off.
This really has shades of the Graham Coutts case going on, and Coutts tried to claim the strangulation was consensual. Yep, he had a history of watching strangulation porn too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Coutts
I agree 100% with Davesquirrel’s concise analysis of femicide murderer Tabak. Male judge was doing everything in his power to ensure Tabak was acquitted of murder. By the way in rape cases the female victim’s sexual history and medical history is routinely raised by defence counsel in a deliberate attempt to discredit the female victim. The male dominated legal system views such systemic misogynistic discrediting as ‘relevant in order to cross examine the female witness as regards her creditability.’ So if a woman’s sexual history is relevant then so too is Tabak’s or in fact any other male’s history of viewing pornography relevant and should be used by prosecution counsel to show the male defendant is non-credible.
Lets not forget that Tabak already pled guilty to manslaughter, it was just a question of whether it was premeditated. The porn use shows distinct correlation that his testimony of ‘accidental’ was bullshit.
Throughout the trial I thought it was odd, that no porn use was mentioned. Now that the verdict has been reached and his strangulation porn use known, it suddenly makes sense, like the missing piece of the puzzle.
Thanks for the comments everyone, and for a really interesting discussion.
cim I think you make some good points, but where I think your argument falls down is that the jury wasn’t being asked to decide if Tabak killed Joanna Yeates or not. He already admitted that he killed her, so the question was one of intent.
He argued it was accidental, that he hadn’t meant to strangle her but had instead panicked and killed her in the heat of the moment. Personally I think the porn evidence should have been admitted because of this – because it goes a significant way to showing that violent strangulation was not just some random act for Tabak, but something he’d sought out on the Internet and fantasised about.
Over and over again we learn that violent have used the prostituted class and/or consume porn – and over and over it is dismiss as not relevant or just some one-off. As someone who was sadistically abused as a prostitute, I do not find it hard to believe that that sadism remains just inside the sex trade. What makes very sad and furious, is when most men are violent to women inside the sex trade it is made invisible – and only becomes a concern when it effects non-prostituted women and girls. For example, the man in Austria who abuse his daughter and her children was a regular user of the local brothel and did sex tourism. There little or no concern when prostitutes try to say how sadistic he was – just an attitude what do expect if you work in a brothel. Until all women, including women in the sex trade, are treated as sex toys – there will always be a covering-up of the connection of using porn and using the prostituted class. Hope this make sense, but I am furious.
he was a manipulative man. knew full well all outcomes and engineered the outcome to what he thought would be a good defence. cynical and abhorrent.
porn has a lot to answer for. seriously. loved your response to julie bindel’s article in the guardian –
From the article i mentioned above i want to put this quote across:
“I am not surprised. Common sense tells us that men who masturbate to porn involving the severe degradation and abuse of women are actually attracted to the idea of doing it directly to a woman. If I admitted fantasising about putting kittens in a microwave, or cutting the ears off dogs, would you feel OK with me being around your animals? If I told you I experience a sexual thrill at the thought of black men being lynched would you not conclude I was a chronic racist?”
with you rmott.
xx
Cath: I agree that it’s not quite the same in a “manslaughter or murder” case, but I’m not sure there’s any consistent way to allow this sort of evidence in this case without also allowing it in other cases of the “admitted A, decide on more serious B” type where it would be clearly unfairly prejudicial.
I think – consider the “can’t mention previous convictions” rule. If someone is brought in on a charge of murder, having admitted manslaughter, it’s legally right that you cannot bring up their previous murder conviction (for killing someone else, that is) in evidence. And that’s far stronger evidence that they’re generally capable of and willing to murder than possession of extremely violent porn is, and it still doesn’t prove (and, legally, doesn’t even slightly indicate) that it was murder rather than manslaughter this time. But – the jury would probably instinctively put far more weight on it than that.
because it goes a significant way to showing that violent strangulation was not just some random act for Tabak
I’m not sure that’s relevant to a murder/manslaughter decision, though. The prosecutor certainly could contribute to proving “intent to harm” with that line of evidence (never contested in this case, of course), but I don’t think they’d be able to prove “intent to kill” with it – at least not without sufficient direct forensic/witness/etc. evidence that you could prove murder anyway without needing it at all, as they did this time.
I think the fact that it shouldn’t theoretically change the result of the case (they either have enough evidence without it, or they don’t and it doesn’t change that) means that because it practically might (the jury will tend to think it means more than it does) it was right – though presumably a difficult decision for the judge – to disallow it.
At least according to the BBC report, Tabak viewed these things in the week AFTER killing her. If this is true then how on earth is this supposed to prove premeditation? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-14904647
M – he admitted manslaughter but denied murder. Maybe your head/desk will knock some sense into you 😉
Evidence, even that of previous convictions, is frequently withheld from juries, the reason being that it has not been derived directly from the case in question. Juries sometimes have to live in complete isolation for days to prevent their being subjected to extraneous influences. The fact that the defendant had been viewing violent pornography was not directly relevant to this case because it was something that had already been occurring elsewhere for some time. It did not imply the defendant’s guilt because thousands of people view this type of material without committing any offence at all. The judge clearly did not want the jury to be influenced by knowledge of the defendant’s previous behaviour, but wanted them to decide exclusively on the evidence that was specifically relevant to this case. Obviously a unanimous guilty verdict would have been more likely if the porn evidence had been included because the jury would have been led in that particular direction, but this verdict would have been less likely to be “safe and satisfactory” than the 10 – 2 verdict actually and more objectively obtained. So I think the judge was right in this case, as they usually are.
Labour’s 2008 legislation on “extreme” porngraphy was supposed to prevent this sort of case occurring, but has obviously failed to do so completely. Could it be that determined killers ignore such legislation?
Well the comments here make a very emphatic case that this was relevant. They also seem to make a rather thorough demonstration of how prejudicial the issue is. It would be more convincing to hear people pointing out that everyone knows that porn is the number two activity on the internet and is increasingly more acceptable; to have people asking if this type of porn was part of a more comprehensive selection of sub genres or whether a fixation with this particular fetish could justifiably be inferred; to hear some understanding of the BSDM culture as being a predominantly consential community. Instead we hear bare assertion of a link between violent fantasy and violent action where an examination of the contentious evidence in this area would be a better demonstration that this sort of evidence is not prejudicial.
Matt, it isn’t bare assertion of a link between violent fantasy and violent action.
There’s a lot of academic research happening that examines the associations between violent pornography and violence against women and increased tolerance of sexism, most famously from the American Psych Association, but also from other academics including Gail Dines. This is supported by anecdotal evidence from rape crisis centres, who say the vast majority of the violence they deal with is linked to violent porn. There’s also a difference between consensual BDSM and violence against women and girls – i don’t think it helps to ‘muddy the waters’.
Ms Cat
According to other reports, including the Guardian one I’ve linked to in the piece, Tabak viewed porn both before and after the murder. Indeed, he’d logged on to one site on the morning of the day he killed Joanna Yeates.
And then there’s this, again from the Guardian:
Vincent Tabak and the porn searches the jury did not hear about:
I think, even accepting all the counter arguments that people are making, this particular piece of information is pretty key, and I remain baffled as to why it wasn’t allowed.
Oh, people, think!!
His apparent liking of strangle-porn is so clearly irrelevant I despair. Are horror film fans pre-disposed to mass murder? I just finished a book on bank robbery; should RBS be quaking in their boots? Of course not.
Until we have reliable data that demonstrates a statistically significant relationship between violent porn and violent sex crime, tittle-tattle like this has no place in a court of law.
The confusing thing about this sudden eruption of THE JURY SHOULD HAVE BEEN TOLD, to me, is that reading the news it appears as if Tabak was found guilty and convicted. Clearly, there was sufficient evidence to convict him of the crime without having to point to his pornography consumption habits.
What, then, is the driving force behind this? I don’t think I am far off (particularly reading the comments) that people are upset this trial to determine whether or not Tabak killed someone was not given the chance to become a trial about whether porn killed someone. Even if it would have been prejudicial and irrelevant, and quite possibly even made any conviction unsafe, there seems to be a resentment about the fact that people are only allowed to express their opinions about Tabak’s perversions (rather than the simple fact of him being a murderer) after the case, and that their opinions now do not have the backing of a law court which wasn’t charged with backing up their opinions.
Here’s why it shouldn’t have been submitted as evidence — because it’s emotive and prejudicial. If there was sufficient evidence to convict without its use — and let us not forget, here, that there actually was, and he has not been set free, he has been sent to prison — then it was unnecessary. And if there wasn’t sufficient evidence to convict without its use, using “but he had porn that looked like that on his computer” would have been a grossly illiberal tactic. There’s no way that convicting someone of a crime on the basis that they have some media that looks like the crime should be considered a good thing for a democratic justice system to approve of.
Lots of people watch porn. Lots of people even watch “violent” pornography, although as is often the case in media reporting on the situation we never find out whether it was consensual BDSM porn or something worse. Did it portray violence or was it actually violent? We don’t know because we aren’t told. The trouble is, the overlap between “people who have Tabak’s sexual tastes” and “people who strangle their neighbours to death” pretty much contains the set “Vincent Tabak.” Outliers are not trends. In the trial of “porn” as opposed to the trial of Vincent Tabak, one cannot help but notice the massive set called “people who aren’t Vincent Tabak.” It is unlikely, therefore, that even if people had been given their wish and this murder trial had been turned into a public murder porn spectacle where every two-bit commentator could have voiced their opinion in the media about porn (as the right-wing press are revelling in the chance to do today), that we would have brought anywhere near as much light as heat. Even if we grant, as seems likely, that Tabak’s porn use was in some sense contributory or at the very least reflective of his predatory sexuality, the statistics do not give us the opportunity to extrapolate that out to a general rule. In fact, they appear very much to counsel against it.
I struggle, therefore, to really understand what it is the people who are outraged about this entirely fair and legal decision think they might have gained had it gone the other way?
Vincent Tabak was convicted of murder and sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in jail. What alternative outcome do people believe would have obtained had his pornography habits been entered in as evidence, and why would they have been a good thing?
Gulfstream5
Yes, I do understand this, and agree with it to some extent, but. I think we’re reasonably comfortable saying the judge made the right decision in this case because ultimately the jury still came to the right decision without having heard the porn evidence. However, for me there’s a question of “but what if…?”
What if the jury had accepted the picture Tabak and his defence tried to paint of him being a sexually naive young man in a monogamous relationship who panicked and killed Yeates by accident? What if they’d found him guilty of manslaughter, and had only then been informed about the other evidence? How devastating would that have been for those jury members, and for Yeates’s family?
I also question why this ‘evidence’ was allowed, when it’s essentially a lie:
Vincent Tabak guilty: killer fantasised about women being choked during sex
Why were Tabak and his defence permitted to present this kind of ‘evidence’, and yet the evidence that proved this was a sham was disallowed?
cim – intent to cause serious harm is sufficent for a murder conviction. The judge directed the jury specifically on that.
“If you are sure that when the defendant strangled Joanna Yeates he intended to kill her or cause her really serious bodily harm the verdict will be guilty.”
Read more: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/10/27/joanna-yeates-murder-trial-retires-with-jury-warned-not-to-be-ruled-by-emotions-115875-23517438/#ixzz1cAFQAJdo
Also evidence of previous convictions, or alleged crimes, IS sometimes allowed when there is ‘similar fact’ – a very distinct set of circumstances, eg when a couple were accused of killing a baby and it was discovered there were the bodies of twelve other babies buried at different properties they had lived at . And in a previous case -that of Jane Jonghurst – evidence that the defendant viewed violent porn was allowed. The original conviction was overturned in that case incidentallly because the judge did not direct the jury correctly. Though the defendant was then reconvicted, in a second trial. I do think the judge in this case was in a no win situation – had the evidence been allowed there would have been an appeal, which would have been incredibly traumatic for Joanna Yeates family, even if it didn’t succeed. Tabak may still try to appeal of course, but the judge directed the jury very carefully. Oh and he has explained that the evidence about the porn did not in his opinion, prove that Tabak intended to cause serious harm when he strangled Yeates. I agree that had it been introduced, it would have proved Tabak was probably lying in his defence, but it’s a balance. Even without it, his story lacked credibility. It’s pretty hard to accidentally strangle someone – you could accidentally push them maybe, but strangling? And if that was the case, why not call an ambulance? How did he know Yeates was dead? I think that had I been on the jury (ok I didn’t hear all the evidence) I would have found him on guilty on those grounds. And clearly at least ten of the jury agreed there was sufficient evidence to convict him.
The reason why people are critical of the way this trial went is because the jury were kept in the dark about the truth of Tabak and his behaviour and it’s quite possible that a different outcome could have happened with a different jury. Two jury members were taken in by him. They must be feeling pretty uncomfortable right at this minute.
Tabak was able to lie in court that he had no idea what strangulation did to a woman so how could he know he’d kill Joanna Yeates when he put his hands around her neck, when in fact he regularly used strangulation porn and had a great deal of interest in it. The judge’s ruling gave Tabak’s defense an opening to tell those lies unchallenged by the prosecution. The fact that justice was done, is not because the trial was administered properly but because the jury saw through his lies, although the judge ensured that they were given no assistance in that direction, despite evidence existing that directly contradicted Tabak’s claims.
It was a disgrace. And it’s disgrace that the porn users are coming out on this thread to make their tedious defenses of porn yet again. You’d think this would be a time for shame for porn users and defenders but apparently not.
Sian.
Gail Dines isn’t a particularly rigorous academic. I’ve gone looking for the APA research you keep quoting but I’ve not been able to find it. Do you have any copies of the studies or links to them online?
When we talked about this before I stuck my response to the studies I found here. To my (admittedly inexpert) view, the metastudies seem to suggest that porn is a moderating factor of existing tendencies, and that drawing an inductive line that runs “porn causes violence” may not, therefore, actually be the best fit for the data.
There is a high probability (given the environmental evidence) that strangulation porn was part of the constellation of stimuli that Vincent Tabak used on his journey to becoming a murderer. However, Vincent Tabak has been convicted of being a murderer in a court which was not told this. There has been no miscarriage of justice and the jury did not allow him to wander back out into society, lamenting afterwards “if only we’d seen his hard drive!” So, other than having the opportunity to extrapolate his case out and form a general conclusion from it, what benefit would the introduction of porn use as evidence of intent to murder have had?
How much pornography do you use McDuff.
Are there any particular genres you enjoy?
Cath
But what if! That is always the question. The jury might have decided that the defendant was not guilty of either murder or manslaughter. But surely it has to be assumed that juries are composed of reasonably perspicacious people who will soon see through a flimsy defence, as they did in the present case. Proof of guilt has to be as absolute as possible to avoid miscarriages of justice. And judges have to be very careful to avoid miscarriages of justice like these.
If we are going to assume that juries are reasonably perspicacious people, then it would have been fine to admit the strangulation porn evidence, trusting that the jury would not have been prejudiced by it.
Do you use porn Gulfstream?
Not the sort Tabak used!
Your earlier correspondents, who mentioned the possibility of appeals are spot-on the Straight-dope here, The Judge was RIGHT to disallow the evidence being discussed here. Why? Because prior to the trial he already knew, more or less, ALL the facts detrimental to Tabak’s case and will have had at the back of his mind a percentage figure representing how much (ie. which aspects) of those facts it would take to reach the ” beyond reasonable doubt” threshold (percentage) to persuade the jury to convict. Although the fact there were 2 dissenters suggests he ran close to the wind, he has correctly guessed that the QCs prosecuting – whose pedigree he was well aware of – would be capable of convincing the jury AGAINST the (correct) claim of the defence that there was no direct evidence of intent that Tabak was possessed of sufficient mens rea to outweigh anything elicited to the contrary.
Knowing that that is JUST the sort of basis of appeal that keeps M’learned friends in the Appeal Courts in business (sorry !) and not wanting to be part of any REAL miscarriage of justice that could have seen Tabak escape, he gave the decision that he did and in doing so has done British Justice one almighty Big Favour for which he should be thanked wholeheartedly. (Smiley Face Icon here, please)
The Judge
I agree entirely with Cath and I think her comments here deserve to be posts in themselves.
It is grinding to see people talk about the “court of law” as if it were this clear cut magical place where laws and crimes have clear edges and can be cut through with knives. There is absolutely nothing within a human court that is absolute.
So trying to avoid “prejudice” is, in itself, a fool’s errand.
It has been said before, but it bears repeating. In rape cases, a woman’s past sexual experiencies are brought up and considered “evidence” enough. So we have to ask, why isn’t a man’s “sexual preference” considered evidence when that preference consists of murder and violence? I repeat, THAT SEXUAL PREFERENCE CONSISTS OF MURDER AND VIOLENCE.
Forget about trying to get the “law” into a neat box, what ultimately matters is stopping violence in all its forms.
And please, no more obtuse extrapolations. “Just because someone likes stone skipping it doesn’t mean that they want to stone someone”. THIS IS PLAIN DUMB.
Just because we can’t draw a clear line between the good and the bad it doesn’t mean that we can’t tell the bad from the HORRIFICALLY VIOLENT BAD.
I think we can all agree that we want to stop the HORRIFICALLY VIOLENT BAD.
Men really love wanking (metaphorically) over the power and rightness of the law don’t they? Even on feminist blogs.
I don’t know British law, but it seems that motive is key here. If the guy buys women, and watches violent strangulation porn, it is motive, it does give a reason for the crime.
It seems that it is the same avoidance as refusing to arrest the Johns, and focusing on the prostitutues. And this should be a warning… women check the boyfriend’s computer to see what kind of porn is on there, and then dump him if you find it!.
Can i just point out that even if Tabak had been found not guilty of murder he had already pleaded guilty to manslaughter. For which the maximum sentence is life imprisonment. So it’s very unlikely he would be at large now anyway.
This kind of argument reads to me as being from the same chapter as Fatwah envy. You know the type, when Christians complain about the terrible violent Muslims being allowed to issue death threats against cartoonists, and then turn around when someone satirises the One True Church with a snide little “bet you wouldn’t dare say that if I was a MUSLIM.” The logical implication being, of course, that they don’t see anything wrong with using threats of violence to silence critiques of religion in general. They just don’t see why Muslims should get to do it when they can’t.
It’s wrong when someone uses “but she was a dirty sex haver in general so she probably consented to this specific sex act” as any kind of a well-poisoning defense against rape charges. But if you believe that, you don’t actually get to say “but it’s different when we do it.” It’s fairly tasteless to say “people get to do bad things therefore I should get to do them too!” Believing that you are on the side of the angels and that you would of course only use your legal superpowers for good is not an opinion exclusive to those who actually are.
The “do you use porn” comments indicate pretty clearly who’s drawing what lines about “us” and “them” here, too. I also have not recently stopped beating my wife. Nor, should someone else beat their wife, would I suggest that they should not go to prison. Indeed, it appears that I, like many other people, am quite happy for Vincent Tabak to be arrested and convicted of the crime he is guilty of. Not that I, like many other men of my casual acquaintance have mentioned, would ever need to be told “he used porn” to realise that it is not normal behaviour to strangle someone to death because they were screaming.
It strikes me that if you cannot conceive of a reason for someone to disagree with you about a matter of jurisprudence other than their selfish desire to see more women murdered at the hands of perverts, you may in fact be using the wrong behavioural model.
The porn defenders are doing their best to maintain “no link”.
However, this was not just porn, but strangulation porn – a specific type of porn, and bore remarkable resemblance to the crime he committed.
If he had been watch ‘sheep porn’ or something, which bore no resemblance to the crime committed, then perhaps they had a point that the porn viewing was irrelevant. Strangulation porn is fairly specific… and he strangled someone. That actually is a huge correlation at the very least, and has relevance. I have no idea if ‘sheep porn’ exists, but it probably does.
As for the moron that claims “lots of people watch horror flicks and don’t murder anyone”. Well dude, most of that audience are not jacking off to horror flicks (even though horror flick do have a degree of misogyny). Whereas the main purpose of porn is to jack off, creating a reinforcing cycle that is specifically based on sexual arousal. Most porn users escalate to harder and harder types of porn because of becoming accustomed to the images. In a small percentage, even this escalation still isn’t enough, and they go for the real thing. Even if ignoring the escalation factor, so many dudes actually do try out what they have seen in porn. 30 years ago anal sex for heterosexual couples was extremely rare. Anal is now routine in porn, and now routine (at least in request) in het relationships.
Cath, you’d have a lot more credibility if you didn’t find the notion of male-victimising sexual violence somewhat risible.
Andy you’d have a lot more credibility if you just didn’t post here.
The cognitive dissonance radiating from the men posting here speaks volumes. They don’t see it but they are as naked in this exposure as the emperor who wore no clothes.
Indeed you’re correct here. The distinction being made is not that of “no link” but of “no legally admissible link.” It often frustrates people that their ideas about what should and should not be admissible in court do not match that of the judiciary. However, I happen to believe that the comparison to people bringing up a rape survivor’s sexual history in court is eminently valid. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to say “we allow one and not the other, this is a double standard and an injustice borne of sexism”. (it is). It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to say “we shouldn’t allow either”. (we shouldn’t). It is not reasonable to say that we should cry blue murder when one kind of hearsay is allowed but then turn back around and demand that another kind of hearsay is allowed. Either the legal principle is sound or it is not.
One of the many ways in which the law of our land fails is in treating members of different classes as if they have different rights. This will not be rectified by declaring that we are completely in favour of unequal application of the law as long as it favours our chosen class.
Well horror flicks and violent shoot em ups are still symptomatic of patriarchal death loving culture. The difference with porn is that well, those women aren’t acting, their bodies really are being used and abused. Whoops! That woman in the porno you were jacking off to last night, now has an STD and PTSD, no harm done there. Or was she trafficked and is she soon to be shipped again, to end up where????
The link is right here; it was death you sought in her eyes. Blankness, and your own death, death to feeling, death to caring, death to knowing her life – an empty shell to you.
I am reminded of the chapter ‘Prisons’ in Dworkin’s “Heartbreak. The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant.”
Dworkin writes:
“I had notice that in all pronography one also found the prison as leitmotif, the sexualization of confining and beating women, the ubiquitous rape, the dominance and submission of the social world in which women were literally and metaphorically imprisioned.”
She ends the chapter with this:
“The one difference, unbridgeable, intractable, between prisons and pornography was that prisoners were not expected to like being in prison, whereas women were supposed to like each and every abuse suffered in pornography.”
What about gay porn? Is there anything wrong with that?
What about gay porn? Is there anything wrong with that?
Well, first, research on this will probably never emerge or very slowly because it’s considered a niche interest, porn is widely held to be harmless and not to mention because experimental studies have shown a link between porn and violent attitudes towards women so that it has become unethical to do them, or so at least was the researcher’s recommendation as I remember.
And yeah, gay porn can be used to objectify men. I have used it in my sexually formative years to such an extent hat I sometimes still have trouble conceiving of men I find desirable of anything more than walking dicks or that I catch myself questioning if I have somehow conditioned myself to be attracted to men. Most women use gay porn now- this will be the great equalizer you can look forward to.* So, really, there’s nothing wrong with it. The fact that it often mimics male supremacist notions about the supposedly inherent degradation of getting penetrated is also completely trivial. Not to mention that the only openly shown rape I ever had the privilege to witness was in gay porn. I also think nobody should endorse an industry which uncritically invokes stereotypes like that of the predatory gay man.
*Yeah, I know In am not everyone blablabla. You still do not know how many women have the porn usage habits I had.
I’m no legal expert, but I think this is wrong – the rape survivor’s sexual background is being brought on behalf of the defendant whereas Tabak’s porn use was being offered by the prosecution. I think – and I may be wrong here – that the standard of relevance applied to the prosecution is higher, in line with the beyond reasonable doubt principle.
In that light, the argument should not be “is it fair to treat alleged victims and alleged perpetrators of sexual crimes the same”, because that’s a meaningless grouping. What we should be looking at is the relevance of each piece of evidence, on a case by case basis.
The prior actions / sexual history of an alleged rape victim would be irrelevant to the actions of the rapist in 99.9% of cases; this is simply a reflection of the fact that our actions do not indirectly influence those of others. That I’ve been known to go shopping in the past can simply not be shown to have possibly influenced the complex developmental and socio-economic path that a burglar can be said to have taken en route to breaking into my house. It’s nonsensical, and is almost always use precisely in order to prejudice a trial – by flying the subtle “she’s a lying slut who really consented and is now making accusations up” under the radar without needing to substantiate them.
Bringing women’s sexual histories into the courtroom capitalises on the still common social prejudice against sexually active women; it can be said to reduce the victim’s virtually non-existent credibility (in the eyes of an average jury) even further. The same can’t be said for porn use, which is all but normalised, at least for men, so it’s not really an easily fungible “do unto others” kind of argument here.
Tabak’s defence was really very silly, and perhaps the judge was right to take a cautious route in avoiding any suggestion of prejudicing the trial. But it’s the specificity and similarity of the porn to the real life events that is raising eyebrows here I think – in other words, the possibility that, while Tabak’s porn stash may not have caused his violent predilections, it is an important clue to the fact that said predilections actually existed. You might say that in this trial, the question might have come down to “it admits to walking like a duck, but does it quack like a duck?”, and given that the record of the quacking was not shown to the jury, things could have easily have turned out very differently – especially with the defence taking the familiar and usually effective victim blaming route to exonerating their client.
The problem is though, sometimes it quacks like a duck but it isn’t a duck, as numerous miscarriages of justice attest. The Tabak case is pretty unique in that he wasn’t denying he strangled Joanna Yeates. FWIW I don’t think it’s a question of the evidence being inadmissible, it could perfectly easily have been admitted, and there is no guarantee Tabak could have successfully appealed, I still think it was a case of a judge doing everything by the book to avoid any suggestions of the conviction being unsafe, and has already been mentioned, feeling pretty sure the evidence was already sufficient to convict him. I think it is really very unlikely that a majority of any selection of twelve random individuals would have believed Tabak, especially since he was a proven liar.
Gulfstream5 , your gay porn question is plain stupid. Of course gay porn can be exploitative. The issue isn’t that it’s material produced to be sexually exciting (which doesn’t in itself exploit anyone at all). The issue is the showing of power imbalances, violence and bodily harm as sexually exciting. Which we can argue till the cows come home is perfectly fine as long as everyone consents etc etc blah blah blah. Tabak is a good example of the other scenario though. He may be rare in the way he acted it out – but one case is too many. Porn didn’t make him a killer, it probably didn’t make him associate sex with violence, but it may have been the trigger that encouraged him and pushed fantasy into reality for him. Do you think Jo Yeates’s parents would think that was a chance worth taking? Even if a man like Tabak doesn’t kill, I wouldn’t fancy living next door to him.
kurukurushoujo – Thank you for those illuminating comments. It hadn’t occurred to me that women might be into gay porn, although I doubt whether most men would worry as much as women do about being objectifed!
Jane Longhurt’s mother speaks about both cases, and the porn links:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2055458/My-daughter-strangled-man-obsessed-violent-images-Someone-stand.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
Also, Tabak was found with 30 Level 4 child porn pictures – although not really relevant to this case, I wonder if he will be charged for them?
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/11/01/jo-yeates-murderer-vincent-tabak-had-child-porn-on-his-laptop-115875-23530853/
http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/h_to_k/indecent_photographs_of_children/#a21
Men would not worry as much about being ‘objectified’ as women simply because they can’t get pregnant. Simples.
Your soundbites, Gulfstream, are immature and groundless. I’m sorry to report but you have nothing new to bring to the table. So why do you bother?
I always think that this is worth reading on this subject, I’d be interested in your replies…
http://www.wendymcelroy.com/freeinqu.htm
@delphyne
Yeah, it’s annoying as hell when someone highlights an uncomfortable truth, isn’t it? For someone with too much to say for herself, Cath hasn’t got much to say about that which I’m alluding to…
Maggie – I was not asking why men would not worry as much as women about being objectified. Also the issue of gay porn had not been raised previously on this thread.
My second and last comment to not engage in derail any further:
Gulfstream5, you doubt that men would be worried that women objectify them. They should, I wrote “I sometimes still have trouble conceiving of men I find desirable of anything more than walking dicks […]”. I know I am not the only one who unfortunately ended up thinking like this, however, I seem to be the only one disturbed by it in our everything-goes!-don’t-criticize-me-prude!-culture. The damage women can do to men is very limited but it’s not impossible.
Furthermore, I agree with Polly. Gay porn has nothing do with this case per se and porn might have acted as a trigger which I think is highly likely. I am sorry that I replied to you out of a sense of frustration about the fact that the gay porn red herring is always brought up. I have seen enough to always roll my eyes at the “What about the gay pornz?” question. Next time I should stop at the eye-rolling part.
“However, this was not just porn, but strangulation porn – a specific type of porn, and bore remarkable resemblance to the crime he committed.”
I’m not sure. Strangulation is very common. The overwhelming majority of unarmed murders 85%+ are stangulations, just because it’s very hard to beat someone to death with your hands. It’s not a kink, it’s the default way to murder someone.
In most of these cases the guys are total nutters. There’s a rape/murder, axphyxiation/snuff porn and long history of violence towards women and exploitation of prostitutes. I would have no doubt that porn contributed to that.
But none of that is present in this case. She wasn’t molested, there was no explicitly sexual element to the crime. The material was milder – people are saying violent and strangulation, but the guardian uses carefully constructed language like ‘held by the neck during sex’, which to me implies it was far short of that. And we have circumstantial evidence of one encounter with an escort.
If it was a sex crime, why wasn’t there any sex? And if he was into axphyxiation, why didn’t he have any of that material? And even though he very throughly disposed of the body, why did he leave a huge stash of porn on his computer if it was a fetish killing and this was implicating? The only explanation I can think of is that it wasn’t, and he never gave it a second thought.
I think there’s a very unpleasant attempt to sexualise this in order to glamorise the case and help sell newpapers and promote police careers.
kurukurushoujo – Thank you for your reply. I wouldn’t worry about anything though. Why not leave the eye-rolling to our politicians? It does them good!
Regards
glfstream@aol.com